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With Sweeping Executive Orders, Trump Tests Local Control of Schools

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With Sweeping Executive Orders, Trump Tests Local Control of Schools

With a series of executive orders, President Trump has demonstrated that he has the appetite for an audacious fight to remake public education in the image of his “anti-woke,” populist political movement.

But in a country unique among nations for its hyperlocal control of schools, the effort is likely to run into legal, logistical and funding trouble as it tests the limits of federal power over K-12 education.

On Wednesday evening, Mr. Trump signed two executive orders. One was a 2,400-word behemoth focused mainly on race, gender and American history. It seeks to prevent schools from recognizing transgender identities or teaching about concepts such as structural racism, “white privilege” and “unconscious bias,” by threatening their federal funding.

The order also promotes “patriotic” education that depicts the American founding as “unifying, inspiring and ennobling” while explaining how the United States “has admirably grown closer to its noble principles throughout its history.”

The second order directs a swath of federal agencies to look for ways to expand access to private school vouchers.

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Both orders echo energetic conservative lawmaking in the states. Over the past five years, the number of children using taxpayer dollars for private education or home-schooling costs has doubled, to one million. More than 20 states have restricted how race, gender and American history can be discussed in schools. States and school boards have banned thousands of books.

It is not clear what real-world effect the new federal orders might have in places where shifts are not already underway. States and localities provide 90 percent of the funding for public education — and have the sole power to set curriculums, tests, teaching methods and school-choice policies.

The orders are likely to strain against the limits of the federal government’s role in K-12 education, a role that Mr. Trump has said should be reduced.

That paradox is a “confounding” one, said Derrell Bradford, president of 50CAN, a nonpartisan group that supports private school choice. He applauded the executive order on vouchers and said that taken together, the two orders mark a major moment in the centuries-old debate over what values the nation’s schools should impart.

“You can like it or not, but we’re not going to have values-neutral schools,” he said.

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Still, there are many legal questions about the administration’s ability to restrict federal funding in order to pressure schools.

The major funding stream that supports public schools, known as Title I, goes out to states in a formula set by Congress, and the president has little power to restrict its flow.

“It seems like a significant part of the strategy is to set priorities through executive order and make the Congress or the Supreme Court respond — as they are supposed to in a system of checks and balances,” Mr. Bradford said.

The executive branch does control smaller tranches of discretionary funding, but they may not be enough to persuade school districts to change their practices.

In Los Angeles, Alberto Carvalho, superintendent of the nation’s second-largest school district, said last fall that regardless of who won the presidential election, his system would not change the way it handles gender identity.

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Transgender students are allowed to play on sports teams and use bathrooms that align with their gender identities, policies the Trump order is trying to end.

On Wednesday, after it became clear that Mr. Trump would attempt to cut funding, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles public school district released a more guarded statement, saying, “Our academic standards are aligned with all state and federal mandates and we remain committed to creating and maintaining a safe and inclusive learning environment for all students.”

One big limit to Mr. Trump’s agenda is that despite official federal, state and district policies, individual teachers have significant say over what gets taught and how.

Even in conservative regions of Republican-run states, efforts to control the curriculum have sometimes sputtered.

In Oklahoma, for example, where the state superintendent, Ryan Walters, is a Trump ally, some conservative educators have pushed back against efforts to insert the Bible into the curriculum.

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Nationally, surveys of teachers show that the majority did not change their classroom materials or methods in response to conservative laws. Some educators have reported that they are able to subtly resist attempts to control how subjects like racism are talked about, for example, by teaching students about the debate for and against restrictive curriculum policies.

Florida has been, in many ways, an outlying case — and one that has served as a model for the Trump administration.

There, Gov. Ron DeSantis created powerful incentives for teachers to embrace priorities such as emphasizing the Christian beliefs of the founding fathers and restricting discussions of gender and racism.

Teachers could earn a $3,000 bonus for taking a training course on new civics learning standards. If their students performed poorly on a standardized test of the subject, their own evaluation ratings suffered.

On race and gender, the DeSantis restrictions were broad and vaguely written. Schools accused of breaking the laws could be sued for financial damages, and teachers were threatened with losing their professional licenses.

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This led many schools and educators to interpret the laws broadly. Sometimes they interpreted them more broadly than intended, the DeSantis administration claimed. A ban on books with sexual content led one district to announce that “Romeo and Juliet” would be pulled from the curriculum.

A ban on recognizing transgender identities led to schools sending home nickname permission slips to parents, which were required even if a student named William wanted to be called Will.

Public school educators are often fearful of running into trouble with higher-level authorities. It is possible, and even likely, that Mr. Trump’s executive orders will lead to some measure of self-censorship.

Adam Laats, an education historian at Binghamton University, said one potential historical antecedent for Mr. Trump’s executive order was the Red Scare in the mid-20th century, during which many teachers accused of Communist sympathies lost their jobs or were taken to court.

“To my mind, this executive order is a blast of steam,” he said, “dangerous especially because it can encourage local aggressive activism.”

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But, he noted, political attempts to ban ideas from the classroom have rarely been successful.

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Education

Judge Extends Block on N.I.H. Medical Research Cuts

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Judge Extends Block on N.I.H. Medical Research Cuts

A federal judge on Friday agreed to extend an order blocking the National Institutes of Health from reducing grant funding to institutions conducting medical and scientific research until she could come to a more lasting decision.

Judge Angel Kelley of the Federal District Court for the District of Massachusetts had temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s cuts from taking effect earlier this month, with that hold set to expire on Monday. That teed up an urgent hearing on Friday in which states and associations representing those institutions urged her to consider halting the cuts more permanently.

The stakes of the lawsuit were put in stark relief during one portion of Friday’s hearing that focused on “irreparable harm,” in which Judge Kelley asked both sides to explain whether the suspension of the funds amounted to an irreversible blow to the universities and hospitals across the country that depend on the funding.

The N.I.H. has proposed cutting around $4 billion in grants it provides for “indirect costs,” which it has described as tangential expenditures for things like facilities and administrators, and which it said could be better spent on directly funding research. The proposal envisioned reducing funding for those indirect costs to a 15 percent rate to all institutions that receive funds, which a lawyer for the government said was in line with that of private foundations.

But the coterie of lawyers representing the states and research institutions argued to the judge that the direct and indirect costs are often intertwined.

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One lawyer asked Judge Kelley to consider a scenario of a researcher doing experiments directly funded through an N.I.H. grant, and a worker disposing of hazardous medical waste produced by all the experiments being run at that facility.

“It is equally important to the research that both of those people are paid to do their work,” the lawyer said. “The research couldn’t happen without that — nevertheless, one is classified as a direct cost, one is an indirect cost.”

Lawyers for the plaintiffs ticked through an array of adverse effects that could result from the pause in funding.

They asked the judge to consider the ramifications of potential layoffs of highly skilled staff members, such as veterinary technicians that oversee animal research and hospital nurses. They warned of clinical trials on new drugs being paused. They argued that many institutions would be unable to bring back employees they had lost once experiments and trials were forced to stop.

Brian Lea, a lawyer representing the government, said on Friday that the broad effects mentioned at the hearing were largely speculative, part of a “nonspecific aura of urgency” that research institutions had drummed up without showing concrete damages.

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With universities in the middle of admissions season, the plaintiff lawyers described a chaotic environment in which both schools and Ph.D. applicants would need to reassess whether the projects they planned to pursue would be feasible. And they expressed fear for smaller universities that were not likely to be able to fill the unanticipated gap left in their budgets.

Even at larger schools with hefty endowments, the promise of government funding had already influenced big investments, the plaintiff lawyers said.

They pointed to a $200 million neuroscience lab at the California Institute of Technology, finished in 2020, that the university expected to pay for in part through the funding.

“There’s going to be a hole in the research budget at Caltech, and actually a big one,” a lawyer said.

The plaintiff lawyers said that other groups not involved in the lawsuit, such as associations of dental and nursing schools, had also become invested in the outcome, fearing disruptions to their own operations.

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“Are you willing to agree that the plaintiffs will suffer harm?” Judge Kelley asked the government’s lawyer after hearing the long list of examples marshaled by the groups suing.

“Not irreparable,” Mr. Lea replied.

He said the states and associations suing the government had other means of recovering the lost funding, such as suing under the Tucker Act, which allows groups to sue the government in contract claims. He added that the 15 percent cap was in line with what private foundations such as the Gates Foundation often agree to.

Earlier, Mr. Lea repeated the government’s claim that capping “indirect funds,” for costs like buildings, utilities and support staff, at 15 percent was simply designed to free up more money to be allocated directly to researchers.

“I want to be clear about one thing at the outset: This is not cutting down on grant funding,” he said. “This is about changing the slices of the pie, which falls squarely in the executive’s discretion.”

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Lawyers suing to stop the cuts said that capping indirect funds at 15 percent across the board was arbitrary, a standard for challenging agency decisions. They argued that institutions of different sizes naturally have different needs when negotiating with the government, and forcing all to adapt to a 15 percent maximum was unreasonable.

“A lot of this is driven by economies of scale, right?” one of the lawyers said. “The larger the institution you have, the bigger the building you have, the more you can house multiple projects within that one building — that’s going to change your ratio of direct costs or indirect costs,” she said.

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New York Ends Funding for 2 Yeshivas That Fail to Teach Basic Skills

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New York Ends Funding for 2 Yeshivas That Fail to Teach Basic Skills

A decade after allegations first surfaced that schools operated by New York’s Hasidic Jewish community were denying children a basic education, the state government is for the first time cutting off funding for schools it says have refused to improve.

The New York State Education Department will no longer provide crucial funding for two all-boys Hasidic schools in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and will ensure that all of their students are enrolled in different schools by the fall. The effective closure of the two schools, which are known as yeshivas, is the strongest action taken in New York to crack down on schools over their failure to comply with education law.

And it’s a move that many Hasidic leaders and even critics of the yeshiva system doubted the state would ever make.

That’s partially because of the long and tangled process that the state created to penalize schools found to be breaking the law, which mandates that all children receive an adequate secular education, even in private schools.

Resisting outside oversight into religious education has become perhaps the top political priority for the Hasidic community, which has long maintained a significant influence in local politics and tends to vote as a bloc.

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The insular community’s yeshivas, which rely heavily on taxpayer dollars, teach religious lessons in Yiddish and Hebrew for most of the school day, and offer little instruction in English or math.

The two schools that the state is effectively closing are part of a larger group of yeshivas that have not made sufficient progress, said Rachel Connors, a spokeswoman for the Education Department. Most of those schools have not yet faced any consequences for failing to boost their secular education.

But the leaders of the two schools, Yeshiva Talmud Torah of Kasho and Yeshiva Bnei Shimon Yisroel of Sopron, which are housed in three locations in Williamsburg, refused even to meet with education officials to work on an improvement plan.

“In December 2024, the department wrote to noncompliant schools, inviting them to meet and urging them to re-engage in the process to avoid the consequences associated with final negative determinations,” Ms. Connors said in a statement. “Schools that did not re-engage have been deemed schools that do not provide compulsory education.”

The two yeshivas were part of an investigation into Hasidic schools that began after yeshiva graduates filed a complaint with the state in 2015, claiming that the education they had received had left them unprepared to navigate the world as adults.

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When education officials in 2019 visited one of the Sopron locations, which is now effectively being shuttered, inspectors “did not observe any instruction, taught in English, in the core academic subjects of English, history, mathematics and science,” according to a report released by the city’s Education Department.

Spokespeople for a group that represents yeshivas did not respond to requests for comment. But an article published Friday in Yeshiva World News, a Hasidic news outlet, offered some insight into the community’s reaction.

“It is always wiser to make your case to government rather than to refuse to respond,” the editorial read. “That makes it seem like they had something to hide. The yeshivas should have demonstrated pride and confidence in their students.”

The editorial also noted that the yeshivas were not being judged on their curriculum or “approach to education.” Instead, their funding was being cut off because they had not engaged with the government.

Indeed, the state’s move, which was first reported by The Jerusalem Post and not publicized by the state’s Education Department, underscores how much some yeshivas have defied government efforts to bolster secular education.

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Scrutiny of the schools ramped up following a 2022 New York Times investigation, which found that scores of all-boys Hasidic schools in Brooklyn and the lower Hudson Valley did not provide a basic secular education despite receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in public funding. The report also discovered that teachers in some yeshivas had used corporal punishment.

The following year, city and state education officials determined that 18 Hasidic yeshivas were not providing a basic nonreligious education.

The state, however, provided those schools with multiple opportunities to demonstrate their commitment to improving their secular studies.

A spokeswoman for Mayor Eric Adams, a longtime political ally of the Hasidic community, said that the city would defer to the state on this issue but otherwise declined to comment.

Adina Mermelstein Konikoff, the director of Yaffed, a group of former yeshiva students that supports secular education, said in a statement that she hoped the state’s move “serves as a wake-up call for other schools that continue to disregard essential academic standards.”

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Covid Learning Losses

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Covid Learning Losses

Schoolchildren in Massachusetts, Ohio and Pennsylvania are still about half a year behind typical pre-Covid reading levels. In Florida and Michigan, the gap is about three-quarters of a year. In Maine, Oregon and Vermont, it is close to a full year.

This morning, a group of academic researchers released their latest report card on pandemic learning loss, and it shows a disappointingly slow recovery in almost every state. School closures during Covid set children back, and most districts have not been able to make up the lost ground.

One reason is a rise in school absences that has continued long after Covid stopped dominating daily life. “The pandemic may have been the earthquake, but heightened absenteeism is the tsunami and it’s still rolling through schools,” Thomas Kane, a Harvard economist and a member of the research team, told me.

In today’s newsletter, I will walk through four points from the report, with charts created by my colleague Ashley Wu. I’ll also tell you the researchers’ recommendations for what schools should do now.

The new report — from scholars at Dartmouth, Harvard and Stanford — compares performance across states, based on math and reading tests that fourth and eighth graders take. (A separate report, on national trends, came out last month.)

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Today’s report shows a wide variety of outcomes. In the states that have made up the most ground, fourth and eighth graders were doing nearly as well last spring as their predecessors were doing five years earlier.

But the overall picture is not good. In a typical state, students last spring were still about half a year behind where their predecessors were in 2019. In a few states, the gap approaches a full year.

Here are the changes in reading performance:

Political leaders in red and blue America made different decisions during the pandemic. Many public schools in heavily Democratic areas stayed closed for almost a year — from the spring of 2020 until the spring of 2021. In some Republican areas, by contrast, schools remained closed for only the spring of 2020.

This pattern helps explains a partisan gap in learning loss: Students in blue states have lost more ground since 2019. The differences are especially large in math. Eight of the 10 states that have lost the most ground since 2019 voted Democratic in recent presidential elections. And eight of the 10 states with the smallest math shortfalls voted Republican.

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I know some readers may wonder if blue states had bigger declines simply because they started from a higher point. After all, the states with the best reading and math scores have long been mostly blue. But that doesn’t explain the post-pandemic patterns. For example, New Jersey (a blue state) and Utah (a red state) both had high math scores in 2019, but New Jersey has fared much worse since then.

Pandemic learning loss has exacerbated class gaps and racial gaps. Lower-income students are even further behind upper-income students than they were five years ago, and Black students and Latino students are even further behind Asian and white students. “Children, especially poor children, are paying the price for the pandemic,” Kane said.

Other research, by Rebecca Jack of the University of Nebraska and Emily Oster of Brown, points to two core reasons. First, schools with a large number of poor students and Black or Latino students were more likely to remain closed for long periods of time. Second, a day of missed school tends to have a larger effect on disadvantaged students than others.

In the years before Covid, the U.S. education system had impressive success in reducing learning inequality, as I explained in a 2022 newsletter. But Covid erased much of that progress. “Educational inequality grew during the pandemic and remains larger now than in 2019,” Sean Reardon, a Stanford sociologist and co-author of the new report, said.

The authors of the report note that some school districts, including in poorer areas, have largely recovered from Covid learning loss. Among the standouts are Compton, Calif.; Ector County, Texas, which includes Odessa; Union City, N.J.; and Rapides Parish, La. The authors urge more study of these districts to understand what they’re doing right.

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Early evidence suggests that after-school tutoring and summer school, subsidized by federal aid, made a difference. Intensive efforts to reduce absenteeism can also help.

One problem, the authors write, is that many schools have not been honest with parents about learning loss: “Since early in the recovery, the overwhelming majority of parents have been under the false impression that their children were unaffected.”

  • A federal judge said that the White House had defied his order to unfreeze billions of dollars in federal grants. The ruling sets up a power struggle between the judicial and executive branches.

  • Many of President Trump’s orders seem to violate laws. Some legal scholars argue that the U.S. is in the early stages of a constitutional crisis.

  • Trump often muses about running for a third term, which the Constitution does not allow. He tells advisers it’s a tactic to grab attention and irritate Democrats.

  • A Manhattan jury convicted three men of murder for drugging and robbing patrons of gay bars and clubs and luring them to their deaths. They seduced the victims, stole their phones and drained their credit cards.

  • A man has been charged in the 2003 murder of an 88-year-old woman on Long Island after new technology helped match his thumbprint to one found at the scene.

  • Musk and a group of investors made a $97 billion bid to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI. OpenAI’s C.E.O., whom Musk has feuded with, mocked the offer.

  • More than 150 scientists compiled a report on the state of America’s land, water and wildlife. Now they’re trying to publish it, against the White House’s wishes.

  • Two storms are set to bring snow to Chicago and the Mid-Atlantic this week.

The so-called Department of Government Efficiency will erode public trust in the Treasury if it selectively suspends payments, five former Treasury secretaries write.

Ratings are critical to the television business; they help determine how much media companies can charge for commercials. But people now watch so many programs at so many different times in so many different ways that the industry can no longer agree on the best measurement. Read about the scramble for a solution.

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